Skip to main content
actuellecd
  • This website is also available in English.

Track listing detail

Stochastic String Quartet

Bozzini Quartet

Stochastic String Quartet

  • James Tenney
  • Year of composition: 1963
  • Duration: 2:48
  • Instrumentation: string quartet

Stereo

ISRC CAA4J0810126

  • 44,1 kHz, 16 bits

This was my first effort to use the computer in the process of composition (as distinct from sound-generation) for a piece of instrumental music, using conventional notation. It is fairly short, having originally been intended as a kind of demonstration of possible musical uses of the computer, but its harmonic and rhythmic complexities are such that it had received only one public performance before the Quatuor Bozzini made it a part of their regular repertoire. How times do change!

Performers

String Quartet in One Movement

Bozzini Quartet

String Quartet in One Movement

  • James Tenney
  • Year of composition: 1955
  • Duration: 3:30
  • Instrumentation: string quartet

Stereo

ISRC CAA4J0810127

  • 44,1 kHz, 16 bits

The String Quartet in One Movement is very much a work from Tenney’s youth: he was 21 when he wrote it. Tenney rediscovered it recently in a pile of scores and the work received its premiere in november 2004 by the Quatuor Bozzini — after almost 50 years! It is certainly a very accomplished student work. Tenney was clearly under the influence of Bartók — as the motives, harmony and especially the rhythmic energy demonstrate. And the string writing is beautiful, which is a harbinger of things to come.

— Michael Pisaro

Premiere

  • November 11, 2004, James Tenney — 70 ans, REDCAT — Roy and Edna Disney / Calarts Theater, Los Angeles (California, USA)

Performers

Koan for String Quartet

Bozzini Quartet

Koan for String Quartet

  • James Tenney
  • Year of composition: 1984
  • Duration: 18:38
  • Instrumentation: string quartet

Stereo

ISRC CAA4J0810128

  • 44,1 kHz, 16 bits

In 1971 I wrote a piece called Koan for solo violin which was concerned with the perceptual effects of an absolutely linear and predictable formal process — involving a bowed tremolo progressing through a series of microtonal intervals on progressively higher pairs of strings. The first violin part in this Koan for string quartet is essentially the same as that earlier piece, but here the other instruments of the quartet are used to provide a harmonic context — and thus a harmonic “Meaning” — for each of those microtonal intervals, within a fairly complex, just tuning system. The resultant sonorities might be conceived as a complex “chord progression” on various different roots or fundamentals. Some of these sonorities will be quite familiar to the Western ear; others are rather more “exotic”. But they are all derived by a simple extrapolation from traditional harmonic relationships

Performers